Jim Henderson
JIM HENDERSON
JH: I am James E. Henderson, and I was borned in 1922, December 28, at Athena, Oregon.
GT; So how did you come to be in Wallowa County?
JH: A lady I know. I was driving truck hauling peas for Roger Stanley at Milton, and she marched in and loaded up a load of empty pea hull and come wheeling them out. So anyway while we got acquainted and we were finally married in 1945. We lived in Walla Walla for 3-1/2 years, and my wife likes it real well over there. I was a service manager at Chevrolet garage in Walla Walla and I started out as; well I was quite mechanically minded, and I drove a tractor, and (inaudible) or the ranches so I decided I didn’t want to do that any more, and I got a job as a mechanic at Chevrolet garage in Milton. We lived in Walla Walla for 3-1/2 years and my wife’s grandparents were the two first white families to settle at Promise. They were there 7 years before the West Virginia folks came; the Carpers, the Bartons, the Trumps, and all of those, and they had some pretty hard times out there where the families settled. They cleared some land and there was one boy in the family and several girls and they -- Vera’s grandmother had emphysema real bad and the doctor said if she would go to a lower elevation that would improve, so they moved down to Colton, Oregon. And that’s where her mother met her father and they came back to Promise in 1912. He bought a part of the original homestead and they raised six children. There were two boys and four girls. Vera’s younger sister, her appendix broke in the middle of winter and the roads were blocked with snow. Peritonitis set in and they took all the horses and saddle horses and sleds and they took her to Wallowa. And Dr. Gregory had a hospital in his home out there, and that was afore antibiotics came in use, so she lived two or three days and she died.
My wife didn’t want to leave Walla Walla. Her father had always been out in the open as he was raised in the country. They didn’t want to leave the farm, but he sold his farm and bought a mediocre house in town and he didn’t have any social security so he didn’t have anything to make a living on. So my new wife said well she’d go to Promise for five years and then she was going back to Walla Walla. We got there for the hard winter of 48 and 49 and it was one of the hardest winters they’d had for years and we were snowbound all winter. So basically I told her that if all winters were as hard as that why maybe we’d better not wait five years to go back to Walla Walla. We bought a place next to my wife’s folks, paid $6000 and we had our bills all paid and we had $1000 we paid down, gave a first mortgage for $3000 and a second mortgage for $2000, and didn’t think we’d ever get out of debt. The first winter we were there, why, Vera’s dad said would I help him cut some pine trees on the place we bought. Had some old growth pine on it. And he said we’d skid them down with a team and pull em up to the deck. Chop them, and cut them up in 16” wood and in the spring we’ll have something to sell and have some money to go on for the summer. And we sawed off a couple of blocks with the old Wright saw that just blew up. Dad said, Well, Hosea Lowry, the old colored fellow at Maxville, had one of those two-man McCullough powered saws. We were going to go over and see if we could trade him a hog for him to come down and box that up for us. And he said, “Well, I just really love them chitlin’s.” So he said “I haven’t got any way to get back and forth.” Dad said, “That’s all right, you just stay with us.” And so I run the steer end and Hosea got the power end on power saw. We rolled the logs down and we blocked those all up and anyway, why I split that all up and ricked it, and we had 100 cord of wood. The blonde….. well, let me see, what was her name? Anyway she had a truck and I threw the wood in the back of the truck and they loaded it and gave us $4 a cord. Hosea was living at Maxville and he was a nice old boy and we were very good friends of theirs. So I started logging with a D2 Cat and borrowed the money from the bank and my father-in-law signed the note …. And I bought the place next to us, see, a little old homestead at Promise, and we went out and saw old Bates from the Bates’ Mill at Wallowa, and we were going to see if we could borrow the money to buy the place and he said he’d have the crew come out and cruise the timber and if it’s there, I’ll loan it to you and we’ll log it and you can sell the logs to us and pay off the mortgage. And he did. So we paid $3000 for the homestead and that was the one that the Mann’s had and it was the original homestead that was sold to us that was Vera’s folks and they were the two families that homesteaded the Promise at first.
Vera’s aunt Promise was the first white child boarn out there, so they named her Promise. They originally called it Promise Land and shortened it to Promise. And then they got the contracts for carrying the mail to Wallowa. They’d come out one day and go back the next, and so we got a cat to keep the roads open then we decided to stay and we’re still here yet.
GT: We talked about in 1946-47 being snow bound up there.
JH: ‘48
GT: Oh, it was ‘48. So that was before winter. How many months would that have been?
JH: We parked our cars in the yards in November and we never got out again until late April.
GT: How were you able to get groceries?
JH: We had plenty of groceries. We laid them in. We had flour and sugar and the staples we needed and Dave Garrett and Joe Horton…. Joe Horton had the contracts to carry the mail and he and Dave Yarrow took six horses on a bobsled as far as Wallowa. They got as far as Maxville, no not Maxville, but Cougar Pond, and they couldn’t go any further when they saw the horses couldn’t make it so…they sledded out and turned around turned around and went back and Joe and I waited for another week and that was about the 10th of February and we started out for town with our two saddle horses and two pack horses and we got out to where they turned around with the bobsled, and the saddle horses were about 1000 pounds and they just floundered down in the snow and they couldn’t go any more so I had a workhorse that I had in the pack on …so I tied his halter rope up and put him out in the lead, and he was big enough and smaller enough that he could wade through the snow and we got to Maxville. Joe said let’s go in Hosea’s and sit by the fire and eat our lunch so we fed the horses some oats we had with us, and Hosea had a daughter; she must have weighed 500 pounds and see, she had a brown derby on the top of her head, and she was standing outside Hosea’s house and so the company (inaudible) had been in to Maxville and back but wasn’t able to plow the snow clear to the road and the last about 4 feet farther or so down to the road and the horses tried to walk in those cat tracks, bout every step or two and they’d fall through to the road. So we got down to Grossman road about dark and our horses weren’t shod. JC Davis was hauling logs out on Grossman then and they plowed the snow. Our horses weren’t shod and so it was just a solid sheet of packed snow and ice and they had trouble standing up. We got into Ray Harris’s about ten o’clock that night and put our horses up and ate supper and we got up the next morning, packed up the mail and what few essentials that people had to have and started back. I got up ahead of (inaudible name) mailbox and on the Promise Road and it started to rain. And I had a sheepskin coat and a pair of Harris chaps and I got soaked clear to the hide and we got up to the summit, why we couldn’t get off and walk because snow was too deep. We just had to sit there and hump up and take it. We got as far down as far as where the road takes off now and Joe was in the lead and I hollered up and I asked him how his blood pressure was, and, he says, it was pretty damn low (chuckle). We got on down to Horton’s about dark and they lived about a mile and a half of this side of where we did, so we got the pack horse down over the bank and we got down and finally got him up and got him home and put the horses in the barn and fed them and took care of them and went to the house put a boiler full of water on the cook stove and got the old wash tub out and got in, got a warm bath, and Vera cooked me a good supper. And life was worth living then.
GT: Where did you pick up the mail?
JH: At the post office at Wallowa.
GT: And so from the time you left Wallowa in the snow with that mail and got up to the first stop o n the road which was Maxville?
JH: Yes
GT: How long did that take?
JH: Well, it was about 14 hours from Wallowa to Promise, or Promise to Wallowa.
GT: So that was round trip?
JH: No, that was one way.
GT: So then when did you get to a point where you decided that you wanted to move out of that area?
JH: Well, I logged for the Bates Company for five years, the manager came out and offered me the job as logging superintendent and so we knew we was going to have to move to town to put the kids in high school, and so when we came out here, Steve started the 6th grade at Wallowa, and Dennis in 3rd and Elwayne in the 1st. Our daughter was borned the year we came to Wallowa in 1959. I was logging superintendent until the mill closed.
GT: They hired you as superintendent, so you must have had a lot of years experience logging.
JH: Yes, I was a shop foreman for the (inaudible) garage in Walla Walla, and they have all their service schools and public relations and how to handle different situations, and I had twenty-five men working under me in Walla Walla. Then they had the strike at the Bate mill in Wallowa.
GT: Can you tell what you know about that?
JH: Well, I was a salaried employee and I didn’t have to belong to the union. The old man Bate told the men, he said, “I’ll talk to you about wages, but if you strike my mill, I’ll refuse to talk to you.” So they went out on strike, and it went for 14 months that the strike lasted and it got pretty rough. I slept with a thirty-ought-six right beside my bed for six weeks. You never knew if you was going to have to … and they had a riot down at the mill one morning, and they’d been drinking all night and they pulled a man out of my pickup. I told the manager I was going back up to the picket line and that I just wanted to make sure that they didn’t do Herschel Jones any harm. And so Jones came from Arkansas he was an engineer on the railroad and he was a grader operator later on. And so the office manager said he’d go with me. We went up to the picket line and they told us we’d going to have to leave. I told them we weren’t going to leave; we were going to stay right there. There was some things that happened that you just wouldn’t believe. I know we didn’t want to go through another strike; one in a lifetime’s enough.
GT: Was Herschel okay?
JH: Yep, he was all right. They just laid him off to one side.
GT: So--were there any fatalities?
JH: No. It’s a wonder there wasn’t; because there were arms brought in to play--there was a Frenchman that was working they pulled him out of his pickup. They beat him up. He said, “All right, I’ll be back.” He went home and he grabbed his shotgun and he had a little Fairlane Ford that’s when they first came out and his wife tried to keep him from going back, and she jumped in with him. And they said, “Here comes a warning”, and so they rammed the front of his car with a military jeep, and they rolled the front wheels back in under it and he was trying to get his shotgun out and a union man walks up to the window and I could just see his head being blowed off, and so finally the town marshal went down there, and got the shotgun away from him. And some fellows in an old ’50 Ford came down from the service station and they was going to work. So the union man stopped them and they just tipped the car upon its side and they walked away and left it. I saw the doors raised up and the fellows crawled out and they tipped it back on it’s wheels and the oil ran up to the (inaudible) and smoked for a while, then they backed clear up to the service station. They come down through that picket line 50 miles and hour (laughs) and the pickets just went in all directions. And say all right so we’ll have to come out tonight--and so Mark cut all the telephone lines out of Wallowa and Tom Bennett got in his pickup and he went to Lostine, and he called for the sheriff and the state police. And Mark Marsh was the sheriff then, and he whipped his car in the middle of the intersection there and he said, “All right boys, break it up. He said “ Mark you’ll have to leave.” He had a pistol in one hand and his sap in the other one and he said, “The first man that makes a move to me is going to be dead. I’m going to kill him.” They backed off.
GT: Do you think that that was probably the roughest time for the county was when that happened?
JH: Well, Wallowa was just like an armed camp. You just sense the hostility. I had an old 4-wheel drive pickup for the company; I just kept the doors locked and a (inaudible) of pipe under the seat.
GT: So did you go back and forth through that picket line every day?
JH: Yes.
GT: Because you were salaried and not part of the union, they didn’t touch you?
JH: Well, they never bothered me. Once the wife, I went to… load the Mill machinery, so a union car followed us all the way from La Grande, and I let her out down at Bill Dougherty’s cause I didn’t know what would happen when I went down to the mill yard. So I had a lot of friends who were on the picket line and I never went out of my way to makes it hard for anybody. They left me pretty much alone. I operated a loader, stacker and we start hauling logs into the mill. You never knew when you got up in the morning whether you was coming back that night or not. But the union served a worthwhile purpose, because people used to work 12 to 14 hours a day and just barely make enough to survive on. And then the gangsters got a hold of the union and at the end of World War II, they couldn’t strike during the war. But the coal miners would strike and the steel workers would strike, and the United Auto Workers would strike, and it got to where they shouldn’t--American industry couldn’t depend on the American workers anymore. So they went overseas. That’s a problem with our country now.
GT: At that point were the African-Americans still here working and did they work at the mill?
JH: No.
GT: They’d gone by that point?
JH: No, there was no colored folks working out at the mill. Ray Davidson had most of his log cutters were colored folks.
GT: So, do you think there were any guidelines that sort of excluded the blacks from the Bates’ mill?
JH: I don’t think so.